Title: aTbRef - HTM5 export templates / timeline in TBX
Post by Mark Anderson on Feb 16th, 2013, 1:56pm
A bit bit behind the curve (!) but aTbRef is now in valid HTML5 code - goodbye to layout <table> tags. As interesting - for me - was getting all the 'content' (i.e. except sitemap, RSS, etc.) to export using a single HTML template - albeit with the existing set of includes. Previously the same used 4: the normal, one for change log pages and one each for image pages with images to the right or across the top of text. I did need to add one extra attribute for this: a boolean $WebImageLandscape which tell TB export where in the page to place the image.

In the spirit of including examples in the TBX, all the old Templates are there plus 4 new ones made in HTML 5 and the one to rule them all when I realised I could reduce to a single template. Any templates, css or boilerplate note with a 5 at the start or end of its name is a tweaked version for valid HTML5 output. The exact mappings aren't documented. The TBX is now set to use the single-temple export and it is left to the reader to figure out use of either of the other two template sets (if stuck do just ask).

I think I've found all the glitches, but do please report any if you see them. The zipped TBX online is the version used to create today's fresh upload of HTML.

If you open the "Change Log" note as a Timeline, you'll see the release dates of all v5.x versions of Tinderbox. All the items in the 'no date' column are the child aliases of the agents in this section. It let me to make a feature suggestion of "smart timeline" where they only show items matching $AgentQuery (if set). However, the latter may be less practical than imagined given that you can do things like drag-moving dates, etc. Still, yet one more 'demo' crammed into aTbRef! It's not in HTML formsee the data exported using TB's timeline -> export feature (this page not in HTML5!). It has to be 1300 px wide otherwise the item labels overlap - there's no on-the-fly cleverness, it's a straight static layout. But is does show the status quo. I'm sure this will improve in v6 but likely not in 6.0 as there are more important things to resolve.

For those (few?) actually interested in validating HTML, I think the only outstanding issue is TB's known glitch with smart lists whereby nested lists are inserted after their parent <li> item when then should be inside it (the latter is a known support issue but won't be fixed in v5.x). The various Google includes didn't prove a problem but the Creative commons code is not valid. Luckily I found an answer in an unimplemented fix in a comment made in the CC's bug report pages.